


Sing Terribly Afar

by deathwailart



Series: Sail Your Sea [7]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3148238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You are young and you will heal</i>, Ah Tabai tells her.  Or Anne in those terrible first days after leaving the prison and losing her loved ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing Terribly Afar

_You are young and you will heal_ , Ah Tabai tells her in the days that follow, when the haze of pain and grief have lifted for a moment of perfect clarity, when she is so devastatingly, _achingly_ alone.  He tells her it when she howls like the banshees in the stories she grew up with and again when the screams run out.

She is raw.  She is hollowed out. 

Mary’s coat settles about her shoulders like a shroud and no one will ever say where they got it and she wraps herself in it, the sleeves too long and pretends that those are Mary’s arms.

_You are young and you will heal_ , Ah Tabai tells her when she turns her head and sobs, alternate bouts of gasping choking wretched awful things that jar her whole body (her body is healing, that pain where there was a child like Mary’s only hers never lived, at least some piece of Mary is still out there in the world even if Anne cannot hold her) or silence where she can barely breathe for the rage and the hurt that threaten to swallow her.  She thinks she could drown in it.

_You are young and you will heal_ , Ah Tabai tells her like it is a blessing and not a curse.  She has had stolen fleeting golden moments of happiness that wilt like every flower she and Jack and Mary ever twined in her red hair.  Red like blood, like Mary’s lips (not the blood on her thighs, it was brown, it was wrong, she was already gone) and like the scrapes on her knuckles. 

Ah Tabai suffers her tempers more gracefully than any man she has ever known and his touch is so gentle when he takes her hands in his, when he washes the blood away, soothes the ache, binds them in crisp white bandages.  He loved Mary and Mary loved him and so in the absence of anyone else, they love one another.  She is not his student but Mary loved her and he says nothing when she wears the coat in waking and wraps herself in it to sleep.

Ah Tabai is old now but he was young and he has healed and it’s only when she can finally sit on the sands to watch the ships and tides that she remembers that he didn’t have to remind her that healing leaves a scar.

**Author's Note:**

> Also available in [tumblr flavour](http://bansheesquad.tumblr.com/post/107150341599/sing-terribly-afar)


End file.
